Bob Pannell, the chief economist of CMR, said: "The macro-prudential interventions announced by the Financial Policy Committee in late June are finely calibrated and precautionary, but could nevertheless reinforce April’s Mortgage Market Review in tipping the UK towards a more conservative lending environment.

"It is difficult to gauge the short-term direction for house purchase activity and mortgage lending more generally, given unknown regulatory impacts and uncertainty as to when the first in a series of interest rate increases will take place.”

Analysts said the slowdown was probably due to the review's impact on lenders, but differed on whether the effect will last.

Matthew Pointon, property economist at Capital Economics, said there had been “temporary disruption and delays” as lenders “bed in” new systems for checking that borrowers can afford their loans in the long term.

“Another factor was that we had this surge of pent up demand over this year as five years’ worth of first time buyers tried to get into the market at the same time,” he said. That might now be slackening off as buyers are deterred by high prices or lack of stock.

Lucian Cook, director of residential research at Savills, said gross lending was almost exactly half the level of June 2007 – the highest ever point – and was broadly on par with January 2005.

He said: “The slowing in the rate of growth needs to be seen against the context that house prices are also on the rise and themselves in double-digit territory. What’s going to be interesting is differentiating the short term impact of the MMR in depressing those figures from the longer term impact of its measures.

"There is a question of what is the new normal when you have a fully functional housing market in a new regulatory environment. I suspect you won’t get back to the very high numbers of transactions that you had pre-credit crunch.”